Tag Archive: food systems. networks

November 20, 2017

Life, Liberation and Regeneration

“We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand.”

– URSULA K. Le GUIN 

Image by Stephen Bowler, shared under provisions of Creative Commons Attribution license 2.0.

A note on the quotes below (and the Le Guin quote above): I am grateful for the beautiful piece by Evan Bissel, “Frames for Life, Liberation and Belonging,” which appears in the Othering and Belonging Journal. This piece lifts up some central elements of an emerging and humanizing narrative for our times, with focus on themes such as transition, liberation, belonging, commons, interconnection, abundance, sacred, curiosity, play, and place. I strongly encourage readers to check it out, to sit with the piece and let it soak in, and to share it.

This post follows the thread of a conversation that has been evolving across events I have been involved with the past few months, and a bigger and broader conversation that is clearly informing it. This is certainly not a new conversation, but there seems to be a renewed or perhaps more public vigor to it, at least in multi-racial and multi-generational social change groups and initiatives with which I have been involved.

It has cropped up in a network leadership program where a discussion about the difference between working for equity and working for justice pointed in the direction of the need to pursue liberation, and not simply inclusion and accommodation in fundamentally harmful systems. Read More

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September 17, 2010

The Power of Potlucks

potluck

|Photo by UU-Jackson|http://www.flickr.com/photos/9240679@N04/2876693936/in/photostream|

This post comes courtesy of IISC friend Beth Tener of New Directions Collaborative.  You can find the original post here.

One of the most inspiring speeches we heard at the Slow Money National Gathering was from Tom Stearns, President of High Mowing Organic Seeds. His company is based in Hardwick, a small town in northern Vermont, which was featured in The New York Times article entitled “Uniting Around Food to Save an Ailing Town”. Remarkably, over the last three years, the local area has added 150 new jobs to an existing 500 jobs, spread across many small companies, all associated with the local food economy.

One of the key ways this came about was through strong locally-based business networks. Read More

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